Email communication has been and continues to be an essential tool in connecting with others in both personal and professional settings. It is also an incredible marketing platform that businesses use to drive sales. However, reaching your target audience via email requires good techniques and a few tools, including a professional email address.
A professional email address is a business email account with a personalised domain, typically named after your business. Businesses and organisations use professional email addresses to create credibility while promoting their brand to their audience at the same time. It also improves email deliverability and drives the recipient to your website.
Let’s get into how you can set up a professional email address in 7 steps.
1. Register a Domain Name
This is the first step in creating a professional email address. The domain name should ideally be the same as your business name. However, if your company domain name is unavailable, you can try a different suffix or change it slightly (slight changes might not be recommended as they can add confusion). Do a quick estimation to figure out the ideal bandwidth and disk space. Additionally, you need to consider email options when registering a domain name for setting up a professional email.
2. Select an Email Hosting Provider
After registering your domain name, the next step is choosing an email hosting provider. Business email hosting providers can start from as low as a few cents per month and go up to $12-20 each month, depending on email storage, security protocols and other features. Before choosing the email hosting provider, you need to consider your organization’s size, number of employees, security needs, etc.
3. Set Up the Email Services
The email service setting up process is individual to each email hosting provider. Nowadays, it is a fairly simple process for most email hosting providers that you can finish with a few clicks. Make sure that your domain is pointed correctly, and you should be able to create a new email account.
4. Configure the Email Addresses
In this step, you need to configure each email address on your domain to make them look more professional. Personalisation is an essential step at this point. Use your full name to set up your email account to improve reliability. You will also need to create general-purpose mailboxes as required. These general-purpose mailboxes include contact@domain-name.com, support@domain-name.com etc.
Additionally, create an email signature as it can significantly improve your brand reputation and email deliverability. You can add a link to your website and contact information in your signature. You can also use third-party tools to design a professional email signature.
5. Set Up an Email Client
An email client is an application or a program that works hand-in-hand with the email server to exchange emails across different devices. There are various free email applications to set up email clients for your email service, such as Mozilla’s Thunderbird, Spike, Slack, etc.
Before setting up an email client, you need to locate IMAP/POP3 (Incoming server) and SMTP server (Outgoing Server) settings using which email clients fetch messages from servers. This process varies depending on your email server. Typically, you can find server settings in the settings field. You might have to switch to manual configurations to identify your outgoing and incoming servers. The next step is to add a mailbox to your email client using the email application of your choice.
6. Add a Security Layer
At this point, your professional email address is all set up, and you can exchange messages with others using your account. But you still need to add a security layer to eliminate any security threat.
SSL/TLS (which basically refers to TLS) is a standard technology for maintaining a secured internet connection and safeguarding data transfer between two parties. It prevents any third party to read or modify your personal data over an email exchange. It encrypts the data by scrambling data in transit. You can secure IMAP and POP3 using SSL/TLS. The process of adding encryption is different in each email application. However, it typically involves correctly configuring the SSL field when setting up the email client.
7. Complete Email Authentication (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC)
DMARC, DKIM and SPF are fundamental components of email authentication that help protect email senders and recipients from spam, phishing, and spoofing. When setting up a professional email address, email authentication is mandatory to increase brand awareness and improve email deliverability.
You can add DMARC, DKIM, and SPF to your DNS by selecting the TXT DNS record type and adding the records. Even though the configuration process varies from hosting provider to hosting provider, you will usually notice three necessary fields –
- Host/Name
- Record Type
- Value
It is essential to maintain your professional email address’s privacy and security in the long term to protect your business and brand reputation. You need to make sure your email address is not visible on the web. Typically, spammers collect email addresses when visible on the web, either on social networking sites or other spam lists. If they gain access to your professional email, they can use it to impersonate you or send you phishing emails to harm your business.
Go to Sniff Email to check your email address visibility on the web. Sniff Email is an online platform dedicated to finding out if your email address exists on the internet. Enter your email address in the search field and click fetch to find out if your email address exists on the web within a few seconds. Based on the results, you can take appropriate action to remove it.
Photo by Usman Yousaf on Unsplash